How to target different English regions and non-English speaking countries from a single domain name.
I have been exposed to rather big websites that communicate to a large worldwide audience. It is important to get it right when you are targeting multiple countries and languages both from a Google perspective as well as that of the user. I have therefore put together this recommendation on how a website targeting different locations should be structured.
www.domain.com – Should contain a splash page with a list of all the different countries available on this domain. Under each country should be a clean link to each translation of that site. For example you may have:
Canada
- French
- English
UK
- English
- Welsh
This can be visually represented however you wish, as long as you have a clean link to each different version of the site. In the examples above you would be targeting multiple language per country.
The different versions or languages of your site should be in subdirectories of the root domain to match browser language settings. The reason why we don’t have the languages hosted on sub-domains is because sub-domains in Google’s eyes are brand new domains separate from the main domain. Subdirectories or folders inherit all link equity (PR) from the main domain – which is obviously something that you’d want. Therefore following the Canadian example mentioned above, you should have the following sites listed on your splash page:
- domain.com/en-ca/
- domain.com/fr-ca/
If you are not targeting specific languages in one country but only a specific country instead then I suggest you stick with only the country code after the domain:
- domain.com/ca/
- domain.com/fr/
Serving users their regional site after their first Visit
If a visitor searches for your Brand Name – they should be served the splash page on their first visit. Upon the user making an initial selection a Cookie should be passed to that computer. Should the same visitor request the splash page again (note: only the splash page), they’re automatically 302 redirected to their regional homepage.
Region/Language Changer
It’s important that each page on the website has the functionality to select another Region & Language easily – via the use of clean links (drop-down is also fine). Should a user select a different translation/region – the Cookie should be updated (irrespective of Browser Language settings). The user should be sent through to the same piece of content, on a different version of the site. Not back to the homepage.
Unique Content
It’s important that every version of the website has completely unique content otherwise you will have duplicate content issues to deal with later.
Informing Google
To ensure SEO success you need to inform Google of all the different versions of our website, this means you should only see your root domain and sub-directories ending “/ca/” or “/-ca/” in Google.ca.
This can be done in Google Webmaster Tools by adding each regional site and then setting a Geographic Target (this can be found in “Site Configuration” -> “Settings”).
Cheers
GoodSeo
(An acknowledgement to DaveN for sharing his vast knowledge on most of the technical details in this post.)
10 comments ↓
Once again I am amazed at the useful info you deliver. So important, and dare I say basic principals that we need to remember.
With the global market, and the internet taking away all barriers it is very import, as you point out, that we get this right. Especially from an SEO point of view.
How often do people have multiple versions of their site, and never submit to the correct search engines, and or have duplicate content.
Dear All,
If we create domains (ccTLDs) like “www.xyzindia.us”, “www.xyzindia.com.au using the existing domain name “www.xyzindia.com” and geotarget the two domains (i.e., http://www.xyzindia.us, http://www.xyzindia.com.au) to respective country locations “USA” and “Australia”.
If we don’t geotarget the main domain “www.xyzindia.com” to any country (which will be global one) and use the same content of “www.xyzindia.com” in the USA and Australian domains, then will it be considered as duplicate content issue (as same language content will be used in all these domains).
Looking forward for your suggestions.
Thanks,
Nagaraju.
Hi there, thanks for the visit! This little paragraph sums its up nicely.
Websites that provide content for different regions and in different languages sometimes create content that is the same or similar but available on different URLs. This is generally not a problem as long as the content is for different users in different countries. While we strongly recommend that you provide unique content for each different group of users, we understand that this may not always be possible. There is generally no need to “hide” the duplicates by disallowing crawling in a robots.txt file or by using a “noindex” robots meta tag. However, if you’re providing the same content to the same users on different URLs (for instance, if both example.de/ and example.com/de/ show German language content for users in Germany), you should pick a preferred version and redirect (or use the rel=canonical link element) appropriately.
Found on http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=182192#3
Cheers
goodseo
Dear GoodSeo,
Thank you for the valuable information!
Here, only two domains are country-specific and the main one “xyzindia.com” will not be geo-targeted.
So, can you please suggest whether it will be duplicate content issue as per GOOGLE. (And also the australian, american, indian content will have the same language)
It would be great if you reply this ASAP.
Thanks,
Nagaraju.
You are indicating via GWT that two of your three websites are geo-targeted which immediately makes it non-duplicates. These sites should essentially only rank in Australia and India right? The main website caters for the whole world and will rank in .com – so i cannot see a problem here.
Yes!, Using GWT, the two domains(xyzusa.com, xyzaustralia.com) need to geo-targeted to the countries USA and Australia respectively. The other domain http://www.xyzindia.com will not be geo-targeted to any country as this is having Good PR and Moz rank.
Can you please suggest whether it will be a duplicate content issue?
Looking forward for your reply.
LIke I said in my earlier reply i don’t believe that you will have dupe content issues on http://www.xyzindia.com.
Our company has a .com site and a .ca site, both with the same content (in English), but our .com site targets customers in the US while our .ca targets customers in Canada. The problem is our US site is displaying in Google.ca’s results. How can we make it so that only our Canadian site shows in Google.ca? Our Webmaster Tools settings are geographically targeted for the correct country. Both are hosted in the US, and I don’t see that changing. Any advice?
Great question and common enough occurance. Although your websites have different domains and targeted in different regions Google Webmaster Tools you have to have unique content on both. Google has now basically decided that your .com domain is the canonical one with the most authority and serves it up in both Google.com and Google.ca.
The use of Canadian language indicators in the header like , the use of the words Canada and Canadian in the copy, Canadian contact details and addresses on the Contact page and even Google places entries are good ways to help Google understand what your intention is. Also have unique titles on all pages and across both domains – you can even end the title with (CA) or (USA).
Duplicate content is your problem here it seems.
Hope you can convince the powers that be to have two unique websitescontentwise that speaks to two different languages and countries.
Regards
E
Hi Etienne
Even though this is an old post of yours is still very relevant. I’d love to sit down and discuss international SEO with you if we get the chance as I think we have a lot to share on this.
To share a frustration regarding international SEO I have the following question: How would you implement the rel=”alternate” language tag on a site where the different language versions have different url locations. Have you seen results with the alternate tag by partly implementing or have you not tried that?
I hope to read more in here soon.
-
Dennis
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